Editorial
Note:
Why we reprint this article

It's the Fourth of July, and most
Americans will celebrate the founding
of our nation in some way. Yet,
tragically, these same Americans,
thanks to the degradation of history
and culture in this country, for
approximately the last 100 years, know
almost nothing about the revolutionary
principles of the birth of our republic.

Although our nation was
established in a self-conscious effort
to build the first sovereign
nation-state based on Christian
principles, against the British
Empire's feudal oligarcy, most people
today believe the popular myth that our
founding was based on a tax revolt!

For that reason, we are reprinting
here, a significant excerpt of a report
published in the Executive Intelligence
Review of December 1, 1995. This report
provided detailed historical
documentation of an argument which is
of vital importance to understanding
this nation: the United States was
founded on the ideas of Gottfried
Leibniz, not John Locke and Isaac
Newton.

Why is this history so important?
Becuase, without recapturing the soul
of the United States in the principles
and ideas of Gottfried Leibniz and the
Platonic Golden Renaissance, not only
our nation, but the entire world, faces
extinction. The enemy of humanity, and
our nation, is still the oligarchy
centered in the British Isles,
committed to suppressing mankind's
impulse of creativity and progress. The
only nation ever established as a
conscious counter to that oligarchy,
was the United States. And to save the
United States, you must recapture the
ideas which will defeat that oligarchy,
in the days, months, and years ahead.

Leibniz, Not Locke, Inspired The Declaration of
Independence

"We hold these Truths to be
self-evident, that all Men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life,
Liberty, and the Pursuit of
Happiness."

One of the most persistent,
destructive historical myths, is the
one which claims that the American
revolution against Britain was inspired
by British liberal philosophy.

The original documents of U.S.
history show, that, excepting those
Presidents who were sympathetic to the
New England opium-runners or the
pro-slavery faction, the United States
government recognized the British
monarchy as the principal enemy of the
United States, from our 1776
Declaration of Independence, until
1901. Even as late as the middle 1930s,
the U.S. maintained a plan for war
against British aggression, ``War Plan
Red.'' The leaders of both sides, the
Americans and the British, recognized
then, that the 1776-1783 U.S. war for
independence was the consequence of an
irreconcilable conflict over
fundamental issues of political and
moral principle, the same issues of the
1940-1945 war-time conflict between
Franklin Roosevelt and Winston
Churchill, the conflict which persists
to this present day.

Later, during the incumbencies of
two Presidents, Teddy Roosevelt and
Woodrow Wilson, each a shamelessly
overt admirer of the tradition of the
Confederacy, a lying myth was
fabricated. That myth proposes, that
the American Revolution was merely the
accidental result of excessively bad
British government policy at the time,
not the consequence of a fundamental
conflict in political and moral
philosophies. That myth was employed to
justify a ``special relationship,''
with our ancient enemy, Britain. This
``special relationship,'' launched
under those two rabidly Anglophile
Presidents, paved the way to two world
wars, economic depression, and the
continuing genocides of the Twentieth
Century.

The hub of falsehood around which
that Anglophile's myth revolves, is the
baseless supposition: that the
strongest influences on the American
founders include the political
philosophy of John Locke (1632-1704),
and his predecessor Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679), as well as the allegedly
rational-scientific system of Isaac
Newton (1642-1727). In this report, we
examine some of the documentary proof,
that exactly the opposite was true. The
characteristic belief of the leading
Americans, as typified by the case of
Benjamin Franklin, was their commitment
to eradicate any influence of Locke or
Hobbes upon the law and political
institutions of these United States....

Locke and Newton as Enemies of
America

The American Revolution was
directed, not only against the corrupt
ideology of Locke and Newton, but also
against the very institutions and
policies which both of them had
personally labored to establish. Locke,
especially, was a dedicated and
declared enemy of American liberties,
and of every principle of justice and
morality upon which a republican form
of government may be founded.

Locke was a prototype for the
well-paid populist ``neo-conservative''
demagogue. He managed to amplify
simple-minded populist nostrums--such
as ``balanced budget,'' ``free
market,'' and ``free trade''--into
shameless justifications for each and
every crime of the British Empire.
During his career as an imperialist
functionary and propagandist, Locke
advocated, among other wickedness:
usury, feudalism, black chattel
slavery, white slavery (serfdom), and
forced child labor; and the unbridled
taxation, exploitation, and political
repression of the American colonies.

A crucial step towards the
creation of Locke's and Newton's Empire
was accomplished in 1694, with the
foundation of a private corporation
called the ``Governor and Company of
the Bank of England.'' The Bank was
intended by its chief controllers, the
financier Charles Montague (made
Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1694)
and his Dutch backers, to be the sole
creditor of the English monarchy in its
continuous wars against France--and to
thereby achieve a financial
stranglehold over state policy. As
government debt zoomed upward, secured
by future revenues, so would looting of
the colonies, via the land tax, malt
tax, stamp tax, and other oppressive
measures, later excoriated in the
Declaration of Independence.

However, until its 1714 defeat,
with the death of Queen Anne, a
powerful ``national party'' opposed to
imperialism still existed in England,
and rallied around the political
figures of Jonathan Swift and English
patriot Robert Harley. Harley's
parliamentary faction launched a series
of bold economic and political
initiatives, directly counter to the
imperialist design. These included:

proposing legislation, in 1691,
to limit interest rates to 4%;

establishing a Public Accounts
Commission of the House of Commons, to
investigate corrupt practices of the
City of London financial district and
its agents in government;

causing the publication in 1696
of Daniel DeFoe's ``Essays Upon Several
Projects,'' which attacked the Bank of
England, and proposed that it be placed
under ``public authority'':

``[A] bank might be very
beneficial to this kingdom; and this
might be so if either their own
ingenuity or public authority would
oblige them to take the public good
into equal concern with their private
interest.

``To explain what I mean:--

``Banks being established by
public authority, ought also, as all
public things are, to be under
limitations and restrictions from that
authority, and those limitations and
restrictions being regulated with a
proper regard to the ease of trade in
general and the improvement of the
stock in particular, would make a bank
a useful, profitable thing indeed.''
(see note, below)

DeFoe also insisted that interest
rates be limited to 4%.

the authorization, by
Parliament, of a National Land Bank in
February 1696, designed as a direct
competitor and alternative to the Bank
of England. The commissioners of the
Land Bank were mandated to raise a sum
of £2,564,000, to be loaned to the
goverment at 7% interest, and secured
by a tax on salt. In exchange for the
loan, the subscribers would be granted
a corporate charter.

However, the sole financial
operation of the Bank (required by law
as DeFoe had demanded), would be to
lend at least £500,000 annually on
the security of land, at a maximum rate
of interest of 4%. The Land Bank was
intended as a government-regulated
source of low-cost credit for the
improvement of farming, and for the
construction of homes and factories, to
undercut and destroy the money monopoly
of the Bank of England.

By the end of 1696, each of these
economic initiatives had been crushed
by the imperialist forces, and the Bank
of England's monopoly secured by an Act
of Parliament. One last hope remained
yet, to strangle the new Empire in the
cradle--the ``Leibniz card.''

Leibniz
Becomes the Rallying
Point

Basing itself upon Leibniz's
exhaustive historical and legal
researches since his 1676 appointment
as court librarian in Hanover, the
Harley faction passed the Act of
Settlement in March 1701--providing
that the House of Hanover should
succeed to the English throne upon the
death of the childless Queen Anne. With
his brilliant student, the Electress
Sophia, thus next in line to become
Queen of England, Leibniz became the
rallying-point of republican forces all
over the English-speaking world,
including the American colonies.

Throughout all this, the evil,
grasping Locke (himself a founding
investor in the Bank of England),
together with the pathetic misanthrope
Newton, each revealed himself as eager
lackeys of the Empire, and enemies of
American liberties.

To counter proposals to limit
interest rates, Locke was commissioned
to produce a propaganda tract in
defense of usury. His 1691 booklet,
``Some considerations of the
Consequences of lowering the Interest
and raising the Value of money,''
argues that any law capping interest
rates must fail, since it will always
be evaded and violated by the rich.
Shedding crocodile tears, Locke argues
that such a law ``will be a prejudice
to none, but those who most need
assistance and help; I mean widows and
orphans, and others uninstructed in the
arts and management of more skillful
men....''

That Locke was speaking from
personal knowledge on this score, is
indicated by one biographer, who
references a large sum of money lent by
Locke to a David Thomas, who
subsequently died. ``There were
complaints by Mrs. Thomas,'' the
account continues, ``that Locke had
demanded too much interest'' . The
widow, however, paid up.

Invoking the ``free market,''
Locke insists that the rich man has the
right to charge the ``natural
interest'' for his idle money, without
interference by government or moral
considerations, and goes on to ridicule
the idea that low interest rates would
encourage economic growth through
investment in agriculture and
manufacture. He rejects production as a
source of wealth, in favor of mere
buying and selling, using populist
``balanced budget'' jargon:

``It is with a kingdom as with a
family. Spending less than our
commodities will pay for, is the sure
and only way for the nation to grow
rich.''

Accordingly, Locke argues that
England can only accumulate wealth at
the expense of the rest of the world,
through control of world trade.
Commerce, he says, will do for England
what conquest did for Rome:

``In a country not furnished with
mines, there are but two ways of
growing rich, either conquest or
commerce. By the first the Romans made
themselves masters of the riches of the
world; but I think that, in our
present circumstances, nobody is vain
enough to entertain a thought of our
reaping the profits of the world with
our swords....

``Commerce, therefore, is the only
way left to us...'' .

Four years later, Chancellor of
the Exchequer Montague again called
upon Locke, to develop a scheme
designed to financially bankrupt the
anti-imperialists and sabotage the
National Land Bank. This became the
``Great Recoinage.''

When a financial crisis hit
England in 1695, within a year of the
founding of the Bank of England,
Montague blamed the ``clipping'' of
English coins for the country's
economic problems. ``Clipping'' was a
long-standing form of counterfeiting,
which simply involved cutting off the
edges of silver coins, and melting the
collected clippings into bullion.

Harley's national party,
represented by Secretary of the
Treasury William Lowndes, proposed to
solve the problem with the minimum
disruption of the economy. Arguing
correctly that the value of the
currency should be regulated in the
best interest of the nation, Lowndes
proposed that the Mint produce new
milled coins 25% lighter in silver
content than the existing standard, so
that a new shilling would have about
the same silver content as a clipped
shilling in circulation. Holders of
clipped coins could then simply
surrender them into the Mint for an
equal face value of new money, and go
about their business.

Locke responded with his ``Further
Considerations Concerning Raising the
Value of Money,'' denouncing Lowndes
for ``defrauding'' landlords and
creditors, and demanding that the Mint
produce new coins containing the full
silver content of the existing
standard. He insisted, therefore, that
someone holding 100 clipped coins,
should turn them in to the Mint and
receive only 75 new ones in return!
Locke was demanding that the savings of
the average Englishman be cut by 25% or
more in one stroke.

Montague introduced legislation
based on Locke's plan, which passed
into law on Jan. 21, 1696. The scheme
provided that clipped money would no
longer be recognized as legal tender as
of May 4, 1696, to be replaced by new
money at an undetermined future date.

To manage his recoinage, Montague
required an unscrupulous individual,
who would not shrink from impoverishing
his poor countrymen, and ruthless
enough to enforce the penalty of death
against alleged counterfeiters. He also
required someone of sufficient
reputation, to thwart the vigilant
investigators of Harley's Public
Accounts Commission. Accordingly, Isaac
Newton was appointed Warden of the Mint
on April 13, 1696. For the next three
years, Newton managed the recoinage,
personally handling the prosecution of
even the pettiest counterfeiter,
advocating the death penalty wherever
possible, opposing all pardons or
remissions, and eventually being
rewarded with the lucrative post of
Master of the Mint in 1699, which he
held until the end of his life.

The National Land Bank legislation
passed into law on April 27, one week
before much of the money in the kingdom
was scheduled to be removed from
circulation by Newton's Mint. The Land
Bank predictably failed to fulfill its
subscription, and passed out of
existence.

Locke's
War Against America

As the imperialist faction seized
control of English finances, it turned
its attention towards the colonies.
American leader--such as the Winthrops
and Mathers in Massachusetts, and
William Penn and James Logan in
Pennsylvania--had taken full advantage
of the political turbulence within
England, to promote colonial
self-government and independent
economic development. This included the
creation of a government-issued paper
currency in Massachusetts for the
promotion of farming and manufactures,
an ``American System'' of economics
later developed by Benjamin Franklin
and Alexander Hamilton, and enshrined
by them in Article One, Section Eight
of the U.S. Constitution.

For these American leaders, the
colonies were ``as a city upon a hill''
(John Winthrop), and ``the seeds of
nations'' (William Penn). Locke's
faction was determined to assault that
hill, and destroy that city.

A royal patent was issued May 15,
1696 to establish a commission of trade
and plantations, also known as the
Board of Trade. This Board was to
control British policy towards America,
as well as all other British
possessions throughout the world,
enforcing the very policy of looting,
exploitation, and inhumanity which led
to the American Revolution. The Board
was officially abolished in 1782, but
the policy continued in other forms up
to the present day.

Ironically for those deluded souls
who accept the myth of Locke's
influence upon the ideas of American
independence, the same John Locke was
appointed a founding member of the
Board of Trade, and proved himself the
greatest imperialist and most
implacable enemy of America.

Locke had revealed his intense
hostility to American liberties almost
30 years before, as a paid functionary
of the aristocrat Lord Ashley, later
the First Earl of Shaftesbury. When
King Charles II revoked all earlier
patents, and granted the territory of
Carolina to eight ``lords
proprietors,'' including Ashley, Locke
became the company's chief secretary.
In that capacity, he wrote the
``Fundamental Constitutions for the
Government of Carolina'' in 1669, an
abominable plan to transplant
European-style feudalism to America.

Locke's preamble stated: ``that we
may avoid erecting a numerous
democracy;'' Locke's ``constitution''
established the eight lords proprietors
as a hereditary nobility, with absolute
control over their serfs, called
``leet-men'':

``XIX: Any lord of a manor may
alienate, sell, or dispose to any other
person and his heirs forever, his
manor, all entirely together, with all
the privileges and leet-men there unto
belonging....

``XXII: In every signory, barony
and manor, all the leet-men shall be
under the jurisdiction of the
respective lords of the said signory,
barony, or manor, without appeal from
him. Nor shall any leet-man, or
leet-woman, have liberty to go off from
the land of their particular lord, and
live anywhere else, without license
from their said lord, under hand and
seal.

``XXIII: All the children of
leet-men shall be leet-men, and so to
all generations.''

``CX: Every freeman of Carolina
shall have absolute power and authority
over his negro slaves, of what opinion
or religion soever.''

From 1672-74, Locke served as
secretary of King Charles II's Council
of Trade and Foreign Plantations (at
the same time profiting from personal
investments in trade with the Bahamas).
Locke's Council passed the infamous
Navigation Acts, enforced by the
punitive Plantation Duties Act of 1673,
imposing onerous taxes on colonial
trade, restricting it to English
vessels, and prohibiting trade with
foreign countries by requiring that all
colonial goods be shipped ``to England,
or Wales, or the town of Berwick upon
Tweed, and to no other place, and there
to unload and put the same on shore.''

Throughout this period,
Massachusetts remained in the forefront
of American resistance to Lockean
oppression, under the inspired
leadership of Increase and Cotton
Mather. When the Crown's agent Edward
Randolph demanded submission to the
Navigation Acts, and the effective
revocation of the Massachusetts
charter, Increase Mather warned his
countrymen: ``We shall sin against God
if we vote an affirmative to it.'' He
attacked the Crown's demands as a
``Plot then managing to produce a
General Shipwreck of Liberties,'' and
as ``inconsistent with the main end of
their fathers' coming to New
England.... Let them put their trust in
the God of their fathers, which is
better than to put confidence in
princes.''

Franklin Sent
to James Logan's
Philadelphia

Massachusetts was finally forced
to submit to royal domination in 1691,
a disaster which later led Cotton
Mather to deploy his young
protégé Benjamin Franklin out of
Boston, to James Logan's Philadelphia.

With Locke's appointment as a
Commissioner of Trade in 1696,
proposals for a more vigorous
subjugation of America were generated
at a furious pace, including
suppression of colonial paper
currencies, and the appointment of a
royal prosecutor in each American
colony under the personal direction of
Locke's crony Edward Randolph, the same
tyrant earlier deployed against
Massachusetts.

requiring all colonial
governors and commanders in chief to
``take a solemn oath'' to enforce the
letter of the law, upon the penalty of
a massive fine and removal from office;

granting customs officials
broad powers of search and seizure;

declaring that all colonial
``laws, by-laws, usages or customs''
contrary to the Act ``are illegal, null
and void, to all intents and purposes
whatsoever....''

authorizing customs officials
to ``constitute and appoint such and so
many officers of the customs in any
city, town, river, port, harbour, or
creek, ... when and as often as to them
shall seem needful....''

explicitly prohibiting
colonial trade with Scotland and
Ireland, along with all foreign
countries, ``unless the same have been
first landed in the kingdom of England,
dominion of Wales, or town of Berwick
upon Tweed, and paid the rates and
duties wherewith they are chargeable by
law, under the penalty of the
forfeiture of the ship and goods....'

Locke's Navigation Act was quickly
followed by the Woolen Act of 1699,
prohibiting the export of all woolen
products from America, along with other
measures designed to suppress colonial
manufacturing, and force the colonies
to remain a source of cheap raw
materials for the mother country.

Soon after his retirement from the
Board of Trade for reasons of health,
Locke's anti-American policy was
totally endorsed in the Board's
infamous Report of March 26, 1701,
which demanded revocation of all
American colonial charters and
imposition of direct imperial rule.

So, far from inspiring the ideas
of American independence, John Locke
and his faction, including Newton, were
responsible for initiating that ``long
train of abuses and usurpations,''
leading to the revolution against the
very empire which they had worked to
create.

In fact, the Declaration of
Independence specifically condemned
several of the despotic measures
originally imposed by Locke himself, as
later enforced by King George III and
the British Parliament, ``all having in
direct object the establishment of an
absolute Tyranny over these States'':

``He has combined with others to
subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to
our constitution and unacknowledged by
our laws; giving his Assent to their
Acts of pretended legislation;... For
cutting off our Trade with all parts of
the world; for imposing Taxes on us
without our Consent; For depriving us
in many cases of the benefits of Trial
by Jury;... For taking away our
Charters, abolishing our most valuable
Laws and altering fundamentally the
Forms of our Governments; For
suspending our own Legislatures, and
declaring themselves invested with
power to legislate for us in all cases
whatsoever.''

John Locke's theoretical writings
also reveal him as the consummate
philosopher of Oligarchy, on the model
of Venice, as Hobbes was the
philosopher of Tyranny, both being
virulent opponents of republican ideas.

The classic definition of
oligarchy was provided by Plato in his
dialogue The Republic, as,
``The regime founded on a property
assessment, in which the rich rule and
the poor man has no part in ruling
office.''

Locke could not be more explicit.
His major political treatise, the 1690
``Essay Concerning The True Original
Extent And End Of Civil Government''
(written to justify the overthrow of
the hereditary monarch James II in the
1688 ``Glorious Revolution''), purports
to prove that ``government has no other
end but the preservation of property.''

Locke argues that Man once existed
in a dog-eat-dog ``state of Nature,''
like Hobbes's ``war of each against
all.'' Instead of subjecting himself to
the will of one man--the tyrannical
monarch of Hobbes's
Leviathan--``he seeks out and
is willing to join in society with
others who are already united, or have
a mind to unite for the mutual
preservation of their lives, liberties,
and estates, which I call by the
general name--property.

``The great and chief end,
therefore, of men uniting into
commonwealths, and putting themselves
under government, is the preservation
of their property, to which in the
state of Nature there are many things
wanting.''

And further:

``The great end of
men's entering into society being the
enjoyment of their properties in peace
and safety.... to preserve their lives,
liberties, and fortunes, and by stated
rules of right and property to secure
their peace and quiet.... For the
preservation of property being the end
of government, and that for which men
enter into society ... to preserve the
members of that society in their lives,
liberties, and possessions.... The
reason why men enter into society is
the preservation of their
property....''

And so forth ad nauseam.

Locke's
Defense of Human
Slavery

On this basis, Locke creates a
cold-blooded justification of human
slavery, by insisting that a person
without property has no rights at all:

``These men having, as I say,
forfeited their lives and, with it,
their liberties, and lost their
estates, and being in the state of
slavery not capable of any property,
cannot in that state be considered as
any part of civil society, the chief
end whereof is the preservation of
property.''

That Locke was an inveterate enemy
of the concept of inalienable human
rights, and an unabashed oligarchist,
is also seen in his wicked project for
enslaving the poor of England.

As the economic policies of
Locke's imperial faction impoverished
the country at an accelerating rate,
the streets had become filled with
whole families of destitute beggars.
Accordingly, the original royal
commission for the Board of Trade
required it ``to consider of some
proper methods for setting on worke and
employing the Poore of Our said
Kingdome, and making them useful to the
Publick, and thereby easeing Our
Subjects of that Burthen...'' (original
spelling preserved).

Locke drafted a comprehensive
plan, including a monstrous scheme of
forced child labor called the ``working
school,'' and presented it to the Board
in 1697:

``The multiplying of the poor, and
the increase of the tax for their
maintenance, is so general an
observation and complaint that it
cannot be doubted of.... If the causes
of this evil be well looked into, ...
it can be nothing else but the
relaxation of discipline and corruption
of manners;|...

``The first step, therefore,
towards the setting of the poor on
work, we humbly conceive, ought to be a
restraint of their debauchery....

``But for the more effectual
restraining of idle vagabonds, we
further humbly propose that a new law
may be obtained, by which it be
enacted,

``That all men sound of limb and
mind, above fourteen and under fifty
years of age, begging in maritime
counties out of their own parish
without a pass ... be sent to the next
seaport town, there to be kept at hard
labour, till some of his majesty's
ships, coming in or near there, give an
opportunity of putting them on board,
where they shall serve three years,
under strict discipline, at soldier's
pay (subsistence money being deducted
for their victuals on board)....

``That all men begging in maritime
counties without passes, that are
maimed or above fifty years of age, and
all of any age so begging without
passes in inland counties nowhere
bordering on the sea, shall be sent to
the next house of correction, there to
be kept at hard labour for three
years....

``That, if any boy or girl, under
fourteen years of age, shall be found
begging out of the parish where they
dwell (if within five miles' distance
of the said parish), they shall be sent
to the next working school, there to be
soundly whipped and kept at work till
evening.... Or, if they live further
than five miles off from the place
where they are taken begging, that they
be sent to the next house of
correction, there to remain at work six
weeks....''

Locke's ruthlessly malevolent
design extended to ``the children of
labouring people,'' complaining that
they ``are usually maintained in
idleness, so that their labour also is
generally lost to the public till they
are twelve or fourteen years old.''

Locke's inhuman plan speaks for
itself:

``The most effectual remedy for
this that we are able to conceive, and
which we therefore humbly propose, is,
that, in the fore-mentioned new law to
be enacted, it be further provided that
working schools be set up in every
parish, to which the children of all
such as demand relief of the parish,
above three and under fourteen years of
age, whilst they live at home with
their parents, and are not otherwise
employed for their livelihood by the
allowance of the overseers of the poor,
shall be obliged to come.

``By this means the mother will be
eased of a great part of her trouble in
looking after and providing for them at
home, and so be at the more liberty to
work; the children will be kept in much
better order, be better provided for,
and from infancy be inured to work....

``If therefore care be taken that
they have each of them their belly-full
of bread daily at school, they will be
in no danger of famishing.... And to
this may also be added, without any
trouble, in cold weather, if it be
thought needful, a little warm
water-gruel; for the same fire that
warms the room may be made use of to
boil a pot of it....''

Leibniz
Exposes Locke's Hoax

Locke's 1690 ``Essay Concerning
Human Understanding'' is a similarly
cynical apology for Oligarchy, full of
contemptuous disdain of ``innate
ideas,'' such as universal moral
principles and the very concepts of
human virtue and love. The same Locke
who cold-bloodedly plotted to break up
poor families, and herd their
three-year-old babies into forced
labor, will not even allow the love of
parents for their children to be
considered ``innate.'' He shamelessly
argues that virtue is ``generally
approved, not because innate, but
because profitable.''

Locke plagiarizes Aristotle's
tabula rasa, comparing the human mind
to ``white paper, devoid of all
characters, without any ideas,'' and
asks, ``How comes it to be
furnished?|... To this I answer, in one
word, from experience.'' Human
beings, like animals, are creatures of
the senses, Locke argues, and are
motivated by the pursuit of pleasure
and the avoidance of pain:

``Things then are good or evil,
only in reference to pleasure or
pain.... Happiness, then, in its full
extent, is the utmost pleasure we are
capable of, and misery the utmost
pain.''

Accordingly, Locke reduces
morality to arbitrary rules enforced by
the powerful, so that basic moral
duties, such as ``the duty of parents
to preserve their children,'' cannot,
he says, ``be known or supposed without
a lawmaker, or without reward and
punishment....

``Moral good and evil, then, is
only the conformity or disagreement of
our voluntary actions to some law,
whereby good or evil is drawn on us,
from the will and power of the
law-maker; which good and evil,
pleasure or pain, attending our
observance or breach of the law by the
decree of the law-maker, is that we
call reward and punishment.''

As the English ``national party''
reeled under the political and
ideological onslaughts of the
imperialists, Leibniz intervened to
directly challenge their champion
Locke, and rally the opposition.

Leibniz circulated a paper
attacking Locke's ``Essay'' among his
English allies in March 1696, telling
his English correspondent:

``You may communicate it to
whomever you please, and if it falls
into [Locke's] hands, or those of his
friends, all the better.''

Leibniz's friends made sure that
Locke personally received this paper,
but, except for cowardly snide remarks
communicated privately to his cronies,
he refused to respond. While this first
critique continued to circulate
throughout Europe, Leibniz authored a
second attack on the Essay, which was
delivered in England by August 1698.
Once again, Locke dodged any direct
response, but by then an open and
vigorous opposition to the Essay had
broken out in England, with a friend
and correspondent of Leibniz, Thomas
Burnet, in the lead.

Burnet's 1697 ``Remarks Upon an
Essay...'' questioned Locke's ``general
Principle of picking up all our
Knowledge from our five Senses....

``As to Morality, we think the
great Foundation of it is, the
Distinction of Good and Evil, Virtue
and Vice, Turpis & Honesti, as they are
usually call'd: And I do not find that
my Eyes, Ears, Nostrils, or any other
outward Sense, make any Distinction of
these Things, as they do of Sounds,
Colours, Scents, or other outward
Objects; ... or that it consists only
in Pleasure and Pain, Conveniency and
Inconveniency.''

Locke responded publicly to Burnet
in the most bitter terms, accusing him
of being part of a conspiracy to launch
a ``Storm'' of criticism, in order to
discredit the Essay!

Burnet replied with biting sarcasm
in his ``Second Remarks'':

``But I know no good Reason you
can have for writing in such a snappish
and peevish way.... There is nothing,
I'm sure, in my Words or Expressions
that could offend you: It must be in
the Sense, by touching, as it may be,
upon some tender Parts of your Essay,
that would not bear pressing without
giving Pain....

``As to the Storm you speak of,
preparing against you, I know nothing
of it, as I told you before, yet I can
blame none that desire such Principles
of Humane Understanding as may give
them Proofs and Security against such a
System as this, Cogitant Matter, a
Mortal Soul, a Manichean God (or a God
without Moral Attributes,) and an
Arbitrary Law of Good and Evil.... The
ready way to prevent any such Storm,
is to give such a plain Explication of
your Principles, without Art or
Chicane, as may cure and remove any
Fears of this Nature.''

The storm against Locke grew in
intensity, however, as the polemics of
Leibniz's friends and others exposed
the insidious nature of the ``Essay,''
and established Locke's affinity to the
detestable Hobbes. As one anti-Locke
diatribe, approved by several Anglican
officials, declared:

``When that Writer [Locke] was
framing a New Christianity, he took
Hobbes's Leviathan for the New
Testament, and the Philosopher of
Malmesbury for our Saviour and the
Apostles....''

(The same author went on,
mercilessly ridiculing Locke's
pretensions as a physician, as well as
a writer:

``He hath spent some time, he
saith, in the study of physic, and
especially of the guts, which he very
feelingly and concernedly discourses of
as if they were that part of the body
which he most minds.... We see the
physic has worked, as all the filth and
excrements of his papers show. Dirt and
ordure and dunghills are the frequent
embellishments of his style.'')

From 1697-1699, Locke was forced
into three public exchanges of open
letters with the Anglican Bishop of
Worcester, who attacked his degraded
notion of the human soul as a material
thing, i.e., ``thinking matter,'' and
therefore perishable, barring the
miraculous intervention of God. Leibniz
intervened directly into this debate as
well, with his ``Reflections on the
second reply of Locke,'' circulated by
his friends in England, and also
delivered personally to the harried
Locke.

Differences
of Some Importance

Leibniz's ``Reflections'' became
the jumping-off point for his New
Essays on Human Understanding,
written between 1700 and 1704, and
designed as a chapter-by-chapter
refutation of Locke's entire system.
Leibniz's arguments therein were
rapidly diffused throughout the world
via countless correspondences (despite
the fact that the work itself evidently
remained unpublished until a German
edition in 1765, with the first
complete English edition delayed until
1895).

``Our differences are on subjects
of some importance,'' Leibniz
emphasizes in his Preface.

``The
question is to know whether the soul in
itself is entirely empty, like the
tablet on which nothing has yet been
written (tabula rasa) according to
Aristotle and the author of the Essay,
and whether all that is traced thereon
comes solely from the senses and from
experience; or whether the soul
contains originally the principles of
several notions and doctrines which
external objects merely awaken on
occasions, as I believe, with Plato,
and even with the schoolmen, and with
all those who take with this meaning
the passage of St. Paul (Romans 2, 15)
where he remarks that the law of God is
written in the heart.''

Leibniz patiently explains that
the ``innate'' creative power of the
human mind sets mankind above and apart
from the beasts, since ``men become
more skilled by finding a thousand new
dexterities, whereas deer and hares of
the present day do not become more
cunning than those of past time.'' He
adds ironically: ``This is why it is so
easy for men to entrap brutes and so
easy for simple empirics to make
mistakes.''

Leibniz demonstrates how Locke is
driven to the absurd conclusion that
matter can think, as a consequence of
his false comparison of the human soul
to a ``blank tablet,'' i.e., a material
thing. Therefore, Locke can have no
answer to the Bishop of Worcester,
except to assert that God arbitrarily
``adds to the essence of matter the
qualities and perfections which he
pleases,'' in this case, immortality!

Locke can provide no rational or
moral explanation for this assertion,
Leibniz shows, other than to cite the
authority of ... Isaac Newton, since
Newton also had recourse to the
miraculous and irrational to account
for the mutual attraction of hard atoms
through empty space, i.e.,
``action-at-a-distance.'' Leibniz
insists, following Johannes Kepler,
that the phenomenon of ``gravitation''
must be scientifically explained, by
discovering the true ``curvature,'' or
geometry, of space, rather than by
inventing an ad hoc mysterious
``force'' to explain it away.

Having exposed their common
irrational premises, Leibniz attacks
both Locke and Newton for reviving
``occult, or, what is more,
inexplicable, qualities...|; and in
this we would renounce philosophy and
reason, by opening asylums of ignorance
and idleness....'' Leibniz
prophetically warns that blind
acceptance of the Newtonian dogma would
revive a ``barbaric'' or ``fanatical
philosophy,'' like that of the
Rosicrucian cultist Robert Fludd:

``They saved appearances by
forging expressly occult qualities or
faculties which they imagined to be
like little demons or goblins capable
of producing unceremoniously that which
is demanded, just as if watches marked
the hours by a certain horodeictic
faculty without having need of wheels,
or as if mills crushed grains by a
fractive faculty without needing
anything resembling millstones.''

In a discussion significant for
future scientific developments in
America, Leibniz counters the Newtonian
credo of ``atoms and the vacuum'' by
insisting, ``It is necessary rather to
conceive space as full of an originally
fluid matter....'' Leibniz rejected
Newton's doctrine of ``indivisible hard
atoms,'' arguing that ``there always
remain in the depths of things
slumbering parts which must yet be
awakened and become greater and better,
and, in a word, attain a better
culture. And hence progress never comes
to an end.'' On this basis, for
example, Leibniz encouraged the
researches of Denis Papin into the
``force of fire,'' leading to the
invention of the world's first
direct-action steam engine in 1707.

Leibniz
and the "Pursuit of
Happiness"

Leibniz also clashes with Locke on
the question of the ``pursuit of
Happiness.'' Where Locke defines
happiness as ``the utmost pleasure we
are capable of,'' objects:

``I do not know whether the
greatest pleasure is possible. I
believe rather that it can grow ad
infinitum.... I believe then that
happiness is a lasting pleasure;
which could not be so without there
being a continual progress to new
pleasures.... Happiness is then, so to
speak, a road through pleasures; and
pleasure is merely a step and an
advancement towards happiness, the
shortest which can be made according to
the present impressions, but not always
the best. The right road may be missed
in the desire to follow the shortest,
as the stone which goes straight may
encounter obstacles too soon, which
prevent it from advancing quite to the
center of the earth. This shows that it
is the reason and the will which
transport us toward happiness, but that
felling and desire merely lead us to
pleasure....

``True happiness ought always to
be the object of our desires, but there
is ground for doubting whether it is.
For often we hardly think of it, and I
have remarked here more than once that
the less desire is guided by reason
the more it tends to present pleasure
and not to happiness that is to say, to
lasting pleasure...'' (emphasis and
punctuation added).

Here, Leibniz follows Plato in
insisting that no society can be based
on pursuit of pleasure, or love of mere
property. In the dialogue The
Symposium, Plato argues that

``men are
quite willing to have their feet or
their hands amputated if they believe
those parts of themselves to be
diseased. The truth is, I think, that
people are not attached to what
particularly belongs to them, except in
so far as they can identify what is
good with what is their own....''

Plato shows that ``happiness
consists in the possession of the
good,'' but that this must be different
from love of pleasure, since mere
pleasure cannot last. This leads to the
idea that ``love is desire for the
perpetual possession of the good.''
Plato then develops the metaphor of
``birth'' and ``procreation'' as

``the
nearest thing to perpetuity and
immortality that a mortal being can
attain...|; but there are some whose
creative desire is of the soul, and who
long to beget spritually, not
physically, the progeny which it is the
nature of the soul to create and bring
to birth. If you ask what that progeny
is, it is wisdom and virtue in general;
and thus all poets and such craftsmen
as have found out some new thing may be
said to be begetters; but far the
greatest and fastest branch of wisdom
is that which is concerned with the due
ordering of states and families, whose
name is moderation and justice'' .

Thus, since perpetuation of the
good requires a good government and
good laws, the ``pursuit of
Happiness,'' in the sense of Leibniz
and Plato, as opposed to that of Locke,
must lead to the founding of
well-ordered states, or republics.

Perhaps Abraham Lincoln had this
metaphor in mind at Gettysburg, where
he spoke of Franklin and the other
American founders as ``our fathers,''
who ``brought forth on this continent
a new nation, conceived in liberty,
and dedicated to the proposition that
all men are created equal,'' and,
``that this nation, under God, shall
have a new birth of freedom...''

Isaac
Newton's Hoax

Although Locke's death in 1704
saved him from being forced into a
direct debate, the impact of Leibniz's
relentless polemics and patient
explanations grew continuously within
England, including within the
aristocracy itself.

One of Leibniz's most important
adherents became Anthony Ashley Cooper,
the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, who was
the grandson of Locke's former patron.
The Third Earl had been personally
tutored by Locke, during his childhood,
but became a key political ally of the
Harley/Swift faction.

Shaftesbury rejected his former
teacher in the harshest terms:

``|'Twas Mr. Locke, that struck
the home blow: for Mr. Hobbes's
character and base slavish principles
in government took off the poison of
his philosophy. 'Twas Mr. Locke that
struck at all fundamentals, threw all
order and virtue out of the world,
and made the very ideas of these
(which are the same as those of God)
unnatural; and without foundation in
our minds....

``Then comes the credulous Mr.
Locke, with his Indian, barbarian
stories of wild nations, that have no
such idea, (as travelers, learned
authors! and men of truth! and great
philosophers! have inform'd him)....

``Thus virtue, according to Mr.
Locke, has no other measure, law, or
rule, than fashion and custom:
morality, justice, equity, depend only
on Law and Will: and God indeed is
a perfect free agent in this sense;
that is, free to anything, that is
however ill: for if he wills it, it
will be made good; virtue may be vice,
and vice virtue in its turn, if he
pleases. And thus neither Right nor
Wrong,Virtue nor Vice are
anything in themselves; nor is there
any trace or idea of them naturally
implanted on human minds. Experience
and our catechism teaches us all!''

In 1712, Leibniz wrote a
``Judgement of the Works of the Earl of
Shaftesbury,'' full of fatherly
criticism and encouragement.
Shaftesbury expressed his delight with
``the criticism of the worthy and
learned Mr. Leibniz,'' and declared it
``a real honor done to [me] and (what
is far more) as a just testimony
rendered to truth and virtue.''

With Leibniz's political allies
having reassumed key positions within
the government of Queen Anne, and with
his intellectual influence growing, the
imperialist faction became desperate to
destroy his authority and reputation.
Isaac Newton, still protecting the
interests of the Bank of England as
Master of the Mint, was deployed for
this job in his capacity as
``president-for-life'' of the Royal
Society.

The ``Newton-Leibniz controversy''
which followed, wherein Leibniz was
reviled and condemned as a plagiarist,
and falsely accused and ``convicted''
of stealing the calculus from Newton,
was no more than a blatant and cynical
political ploy, calculated to inflame
English chauvinism and xenophobia. To
provoke the confrontation, the Royal
Society published the following crude
ravings of John Keill in May 1711:

``Surely the merits of Leibniz in
the world of learning are very great;
this I freely acknowledge, nor can
anyone who has read his contributions
to the Acta of Leipzig deny that he is
most learned in the more obscure parts
of mathematics. Since he possesses so
many unchallengeable riches of his own,
certainly I fail to see why he wishes
to load himself with the spoils stolen
from others. Accordingly, when I
perceived that his associates were so
partial towards him that they heaped
undeserved praise upon him, I supposed
it no misplaced zeal on behalf of our
nation to endeavor to make safe and
preserve for Newton what is really his
own. For if it was proper for those of
Leipzig to pin on Leibniz another's
garland, it is proper for Britons to
restore to Newton that which was
snatched from him, without accusations
of slander.''

Leibniz alerted his English
correspondents to ``the plot that I
learned of to attack me in your
country,'' and publicly demanded
justice from the Royal Society. The
Society responded by forming a
committee of Leibniz's enemies, which
issued an official report on April 12,
1712, drafted by Newton himself, later
published under the title
Commercium Epistolicum. This
kangaroo court declared ``Mr. Newton
the first inventor; and are of opinion
that Mr. Keill in asserting the same
has been no way injurious to Mr.
Leibniz.''

Campaign
of Hatred and Slander v.
Leibniz

So began the campaign of hatred
and slander against Leibniz within
England, designed both to discredit and
suppress his philosophy, as well as to
avert the immediate political threat
that, should Queen Anne die too soon,
Leibniz might arrive in England as the
Prime Minister of the next English
monarch.

With the death of Sophia on June
8, 1714, the position of Leibniz and
his allies rapidly collapsed. When Anne
died on Aug. 1, the succession passed
to Sophia's misanthropic son George
Louis, a long-time paid asset of the
imperialist faction. The new King
George I refused Leibniz permission to
come to England. Harley was arrested
and charged with treason, while Swift
fled to Ireland.

As Leibniz wrote to Sophia's
daughter-in-law Princess Caroline,
speaking of her untimely passing: ``It
is not she, it is Hanover, it is
England, it is the world, it is I who
lost thereby.''

However, it was Leibniz's
influence on this same Princess
Caroline, wife of the future King
George II, which finally forced
Newton's controllers Samuel Clarke and
the Venetian Antonio Conti, to engage
in the momentous public debate,
immortalized as the Leibniz-Clarke
Correspondences.

As Clarke writes, addressing
Caroline in his Dedication to the 1717
edition of the
Correspondences,

``The late
Learned Mr. Leibnitz well understood,
how great an Honour and Reputation it
would be to him, to have his Arguments
approved by a Person of Your Royal
Highnesses Character.''

In fact, Clarke
barely dissuaded her from having
Leibniz's Theodicy translated
into English.

The ideology of Locke and Newton
was utterly demolished in the course of
this debate, where Leibniz heaped
particular scorn on the Newtonian
``atoms and the vacuum'' dogma, and
established, at the outset, the threat
to civilization posed by the new
orthodox British philosophy, stating
bluntly: ``Natural religion itself
seems to be declining [in England] very
much.''

When Clarke cites the ``vacuum
discovered by Mr. Guericke of
Magdeburg, which is made by pumping the
air out of a receiver,'' Leibniz
objects, ``that there is no vacuum at
all in the tube or receiver: since
glass has small pores, which the beams
of light, the effluvia of the
loadstone, and other very thin fluids
may go through.''

Leibniz hammers away against the
Newtonian ``occult'' force of
attraction, championed, he says, by
``minds a little too much carried away
by the misfortune of the times,'' and
insists that the true cause of
gravitation remains to be discovered:
``What has happened in poetry, happens
also in the philosophical world. People
are grown weary of rational
romances...|; and they are become fond
again of the tales of fairies.''

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz died in
Hanover on Nov. 14, 1716--only then
could the imperialist faction feel
secure in their triumph within England,
founded upon a Newtonian/Lockean
intellectual tyranny throughout the
Empire.

The Scotsman John Ker attempted
one final meeting with Leibniz, in a
last-ditch effort to save the
situation. Ker reports:

``I arrived in Hanover in the
Month of November 1716, on the very Day
the late famous Monsieur de Leibnitz
died, which plunged me into so much
Sorrow and Grief, that I cannot express
it. I shall not pretend to give the
Character of this incomparable Senator,
for more able Pens have already made
Encomiums upon this truly great Man,
whose very meritorious Fame must
continue while Learning or the World
endures;|...

``I must confess it afforded me
Matter of strange Reflection, when I
perceived the little Regard that was
paid to his Ashes by the Hanoverians;
for he was buried in a few Days after
his Decease more like a Robber than,
what he was, the Ornament of his
Country.''

Logan Battles
the Newtonians

As the Newtonian dark age settled
over the Empire, resistance became more
determined in the American colonies,
leading directly to the American
Revolution 60 years later. The true
history of this process unfolds in the
pages of H. Graham Lowry's How The
Nation Was Won--America's Untold Story,
1630-1754.

The letters and unpublished
manuscripts of James Logan provide
further proof of the explicitly
anti-Locke, anti-Newton commitments of
the greatest American leaders, and of
the direct influence of the ideas and
person of Leibniz on the movement
towards American independence.

Logan was born in Ulster, the son
of a Scots Quaker schoolmaster. By the
time he was selected by William Penn to
be his secretary and accompany him to
Pennsylvania in 1699, Logan had taught
himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French,
Italian, and Spanish (he undertook to
learn Arabic, Syriac, and Persian at
age 70), and had begun his lifelong
studies of mathematics, astronomy, and
the physical sciences. Before meeting
Penn, he had sold his first library of
800 volumes for capital to start a
business.

Penn returned to England in 1701,
to join Harley and Swift in defense of
colonial rights against Locke and his
Board of Trade. Logan visited England
in the significant years of 1709-1711,
and again in 1723-1724, where he
attended a meeting of the Royal
Society, presided over by the decrepit
Newton. Penn died in England in 1718,
but not before naming Harley in his
will as a protector of his province, an
arrangement nullified with the
succession of George I.

Thereafter, until his death in
1751, Logan remained a leading
political and intellectual figure in
the colony, holding at various times
every important public office,
including mayor of Philadelphia,
president of the Assembly, Chief
Justice and Lieutenant-Governor. He
supported every measure for colonial
unity and defense, even denouncing the
hypocrisy of Quaker pacifism.

When Logan's library was
catalogued in the early 1970s,
researchers counted 2,185 titles in
2,651 volumes. Benjamin Franklin's
obituary of Logan was impassioned on
this point:

``But the most noble Monument of
his Wisdom, Publick Spirit,
Benevolence, and affectionate Regard to
the People of Pennsylvania, is his
LIBRARY; which he has been collecting
these 50 Years past, with the greatest
Care and Judgment, intending it a
Benefaction to the Publick for the
Increase of Knowledge, and for the
common Use and Benefit of all Lovers of
Learning. It contains the best Editions
of the best Books in various Languages,
Arts and Sciences, and is without Doubt
the largest, and by far the most
valuable Collection of the Kind in this
part of the World, and will convey the
Name of Logan thro' Ages, with Honour,
to the latest Posterity.''

Logan read most, if not all, of
his books, and his extensive marginal
annotations in a variety of languages
are still quite legible. His
handwriting is present, for example, in
the margins of some pages of the 1717
edition of the Leibniz-Clarke
Correspondences, a book which
later appears in the 1741 catalogue of
Franklin's Library Company of
Philadelphia, possibly donated by
Logan.

Logan's letterbooks also show him
particularly anxious to assemble a
complete set of the Acta
Eruditorum of Leipzig, the learned
journal which published the works of
Leibniz and his allies, including Papin
and the Bernoullis, and which was the
center of continental European
resistance to the Newtonian onslaught.
Logan informed a correspondent in 1749,
``I have all the Acta Eruditorum from
1688 to 1727 except for three
intermediate years between 1700 & 1710
& some Supplementa.''

Logan's Allies
Plan Westward
Development

A frequent correspondent of Logan
was Robert Hunter, then-Governor of New
York and New Jersey, and an important
political ally of Harley and Swift.
Hunter collaborated with Virginia Gov.
Alexander Spotswood's plans for
westward development of the American
colonies, and arranged that his own
successor in 1720, William Burnet,
would continue the project. Burnet also
maintained the correspondences with
Logan.

Logan's letters to Hunter and
Burnet prove that these American
leaders were quite conscious of the
political implications of the Newtonian
tyranny, including especially the
witchhunt against Leibniz.

An outraged Logan wrote to Hunter,
Sept. 22 1715, protesting the
politically-motivated editing of the
second edition of Newton's
Principia. The name of Royal
Astronomer John Flamsteed had been
censored, Logan declared, because

``Poor Flamsteed has appeared a violent
Whig ... and the better (I Suppose) to
express their abhorence of his
Principles, they have now almost
everywhere left out his name....

``This will be owned I Suppose to
be Carrying the mattter very far, and,
indeed, upon the whole, they seem, on
all sides, to be ripening for their own
destruction. Our unhappy divisions in
the last Years of the Queen appear'd
terrible. And now, after so favorable a
Conjuncture thrown in by Providence
that one might have expected would set
all to rights, they are rendered more
dreadful than ever.... The unhappines
of having a Nation generally
distempered seems to me to be
inexpressible....''

Logan's shock and indignation
against the Newtonians reached a
breaking point in 1727, when he
received the Principia's
infamous third edition, wherein even
the cursory mention of Leibniz's name
as an independent discoverer of the
calculus had been totally erased.

``|'Tis certain the world was
obliged only to Leibnitz for the
publication of that method, who was so
fair as to communicate it in a great
measure to Oldenburg in 1677, when Sir
Isaac was so careful of concealing his,
that he involved it in his Letter [of]
1676 in strange knotts of Letters, that
all the art & skill of the universe
could never Decipher.... And yet
foreigners have generally been so Just
as to pay all possible deference to Sir
Isaac as an Inventor, tho' till his
Publication of the Principia in 1687,
they never had anything of it from him.
I have often indeed wished that Sir
Isaac himself had never entered into
the Dispute, but would, if it must be
disputed, have left it to others, for
then the world would have been inclined
to do him more Justice than now perhaps
they will, when he is considered as a
party, which he has so warmly made
himself.''

Logan goes on to express his
disgust at the absurd deification of
Newton in England, as seen in the
ridiculous portrait of him featured in
the same edition of the
Principia:

``But there is not less Humour
shewn in his Picture in the front, much
more like W. Leybourn in his own hair
at the age of 40 or 50 than Sir Isaac
Newton at 83. And by all those who have
seen him of late, as I did, bending so
much under the Load of years that, with
some difficulty, he mounted the stairs
of the Society's Room, that Youthful
Representation will, I fear, be
considered rather as an object of
Ridicule than Respect, & much sooner
raise Pity than Esteem.''

Logan dashed off another letter on
the same date directly to a member of
the Royal Society, venting his outrage
about both the ludicrous picture of
Newton and the suppression of Leibniz.
Logan added a thinly-veiled warning
concerning the political implications
of these developments for the future of
colonial relations:

``Should the management of the
more momentous Councils about a Mile
further up the Thames [in Parliament]
be like these, in the present
unaccountable Commotions of Europe,
that seem to point out fate to us
pregnant with vast events, we might
have reason to tremble, and those
should think themselves happiest who
are farthest out of their reach. But
it may be hoped our State Politicks far
exceed those in the way of Learning.
How it may prove, time only must
show.''

In his next letter to Burnet, May
10, 1727, Logan questions Newton's
sanity, and further dissects the
political motives for the frameup of
Leibniz, expressing his wish that the
succession had been accomplished by
1710 (which would have made Sophia
Queen of England):

``He [Newton] is, however great,
but a man, & when I last saw him in
1724 walking up Crane Court & the
stairs leading to the Society's Room,
he bent under his Load of years
exceeding unlike what they have
Represented him two years after as in
body. 'Tis but reasonable to expect a
declension elsewhere, so that for his
own honour as well as the Nation's, to
which he has been a very great one, had
he & Queen Anne both been gathered to
their Ancestors by the year 1710,
before that fierce, unnatural Dispute
broke out between him and Leibniz,
which I always believed, was blown up
by the forces of the society in
opposition to the house that had so
long employ'd Leibniz....'' (emphasis
added)

After Newton's death in 1727,
Logan could not resist a final
irreverency, in a letter to Burnet
(Jan. 10, 1728):

``I hope also G. Strahan has by
this time furnish'd thee with the new
Edit. of Newton, for whose age &
strength, death has not, it seems,
consulted his new picture.'' (emphasis
added)

The more that Logan investigated
the facts and circumstances of the
Leibniz-Newton controversy, the more he
became convinced of the fraudulent
nature of Newton's claims. In fact,
Logan and Hunter had already passed
judgment on Leibniz's accuser John
Keill, who had visited New York in
about 1710. As Logan later wrote to an
English correspondent:

``I am sensible John Keyl was a
great Mathematician, but when at N York
with Genl. Hunter, he shewed himself an
intolerable Debauchee, whimsical,
irregular in all his Conduct.... This
was the character I had of him from G.
Hunter, an Excellent Judge of men....''

Although Newton's preoccupation
with alchemy and witchcraft was not
exposed until the Twentieth Century,
Logan pitilessly attacked the
irrational ravings of two of Newton's
rarely-mentioned published works of
that period: ``The Chronology of
Ancient Kingdoms Amended'' (1728), and
``Observations upon the Prophecies of
Daniel'' (1733). In letters to Burnet
and others, Logan derided Newton's
arguments in blunt terms, such as,
``nothing can be more imaginary or
groundless,'' ``a piece of finesse
only,'' and ``a sally of fancy and
Imagination.'' ``I am exceedingly
grieved at this Performance of his,''
Logan wrote Burnet, ``which cannot but
expose his memory to the Censure of all
rational Judges.''

Logan and
Franklin

In 1727, the 21-year-old Benjamin
Franklin, recently deployed to
Philadelphia by his Boston mentor
Cotton Mather, organized a ``club of
mutual improvement'' called the Junto,
composed of the city's most
``ingenious'' young men. Franklin's
autobiographical outline for this
period includes the note: ``Logan fond
of me. His library.''

Along with opening his home and
library to Franklin and his young
associates, Logan is credited with
arranging the first large job for
Franklin's new printing business in
1731. Franklin also printed Logan's
translations of Cato's ``Moral
Distichs'' in 1735, and Cicero's ``Cato
Major'' in 1744, Franklin's preface to
the latter expressing the wish that
``this first Translation of a Classic
in this Western World may be followed
with many others ... and be a happy
Omen that Philadelphia shall become the
Seat of the American Muses....''

About this time, Logan resolved to
write his own philosophical tract,
designed as a polemic against British
ideology, starting with what he called
the ``detestable notion'' and
``pernicious thesis'' of Hobbes,
``taking this for my foundation against
Hobbes that Man was primarily in his
Nature formed for Society.''

Logan titled his book The
Duties Of Man As They May Be Deduced
From Nature, and circulated copies
of each chapter among the circles of
Franklin's Junto, and to his
correspondents in England. The
manuscript was supposedly ``lost'' in
England, and little was known of its
contents until it was rediscovered in
1971. A photocopy of the 400-page work,
in Logan's longhand, is in the
possession of this author; otherwise,
it still sits unpublished on the
shelves of the Historical Society of
Pennsylvania.

A thorough reading of the work
reveals it to be a direct attack on the
authority of Locke and Newton, as well
as Hobbes, precisely in the line of
argument of Leibniz and his English
allies earlier. Where Locke denied the
existence of ``innate ideas,'' reducing
morality to the arbitrary rules of the
lawgiver, Logan's thesis is that all
morality is naturally ``implanted'' in
human beings. Logan's point echoes
Leibniz's famous comment, ``Natural
religion itself seems to decay [in
England] very much....''

Logan's challenge to Newtonian
orthodoxy, expressed in a lengthy
footnote to his Chapter 2, ``Of the
Exterior Senses,'' is of particular
significance for its discussion of
electricity.

Franklin began his electrical
experiments after attending a lecture
in Boston in 1743, only a few years
after Logan wrote and circulated these
ideas. Franklin's subsequent scientific
work is usually mis-portrayed as mere
tinkering based on ``trial and error''
(or even more ludicrously, as
``Newtonianism!''), and as concerned
with practical results, not ``theory.''
However, Logan's ``heretical''
conjecture that electricity might
somehow constitute a ``subtle fluid''
filling space, of the type discussed by
Leibniz and other opponents of the
Newtonian ``vacuum,'' suggests that
Franklin was indeed inspired by
``metaphysical'' considerations.

Logan explains that, ``Electricity
was formerly regarded but as a trifling
appearance in Nature, and therefor in
the last curious age was very little
considered; for that quality was
supposed to be excited, only by putting
into motion the finer parts of the body
it was found in....'' He refers to
certain ``surprising phenomena arising
from electricity'' in recent
experiments, in which

``we may see a
field open for Speculations, that if
duly persued, may probably lead us into
more just and extensive notions of our
bodies, and the world we live in, than
have hitherto been generally thought
of.

``And if there be no heresy in
mentioning it in the present age, why
may we not venture to question the
reasonableness of asserting a vacuum as
indispensably necessary to the
continuance of motion?|: The argument
may indeed hold in relation to all such
bodies, the matter of light excepted,
as our senses are formed to take
cognicance of, but shall we from thence
presume to judge of all the kinds of
subtile matter that space may be filled
with? Can we be sure that there is no
electric or elastic medium that
instead of obstructing or retarding
motion may be the very means of
continuing it?

``Can we say an exhausted receiver
is a vacuum because the air is drawn
out of it, while at the same time we
see it filled with light, the matter of
which in the true nature of things and
on a just estimate of them, tho' not
according to our apprehensions, may
possibly be a more essential substance
than the earth or stones we tread on.

``But if a vacuum be not
absolutely necessary, as that alloted
by some to the atherial spaces cannot
be, then undoubtedly to have all space
in the universe possessed by some kind
of matter is much more consistent with
the dignity, beauty, and order of the
whole than to imagine those vast voids
which carry even a kind of horror in
the thought'' .

Franklin's
crucial experiments in
electricity

Franklin performed his famous kite
experiment in Philadelphia in June of
1752, proving the identity of lightning
and electricity. Franklin says his
paper on that topic had been ``laughed
at by the connoisseurs'' of the British
Royal Society, but had achieved great
notoriety in France, where his
``capital experiment'' was successfully
duplicated before King Louis XV and his
court, and therefore could no longer be
suppressed.

In fact, what Franklin had
accomplished, as his own
correspondences of that period prove,
was a crucial experiment, designed by
him to overthrow the Newtonian
system--he had proven that electricity
was no ``trifling appearance in
Nature,'' but that it, in some fashion,
permeated space.

Franklin's exchange of letters
with New Yorker Cadwallader Colden in
the period leading up to his
experiment, also demonstrates the
extent to which the Leibniz-Newton
conflict defined the intellectual
battlelines in pre-revolutionary
America.

Franklin met Colden in 1743, the
same year in which he began his
electrical studies. The two
collaborated for awhile on scientific
and philosophical matters, and Colden
backed Franklin's plan for colonial
unity at the 1754 Albany Convention,
but eventually broke with him on the
issue of American independence.

Colden brought the wrath of the
Newtonian tyranny directly down upon
his head, writing a paper in 1745 which
he titled, ``Explication of the First
Causes of Motion in Matter, and of the
Cause of Gravitation.'' Colden had
rejected ``action-at-a-distance,'' and
presumed to suggest that the effect of
gravity might have a rational
explanation.

Franklin offered to print the work
``at my own expense and risk,'' and
circulated copies in Philadelphia,
where it aroused a storm of
intellectual ferment. Logan's opinion,
according to Franklin, was ``that the
Doctrine of Gravity's being the effect
of Elasticity was originally
Bernoulli's, but he believed you had
not seen Bernoulli.''

Colden wrote to Franklin on May
20, 1752, reporting on the progress of
his ideas in Europe:

``I have received a copy of the
Translation of my first piece into High
Dutch with animadversions on it at the
end of it printed at Hamburg and
Leipsic in 1748, but I do not
understand one word of them. I find my
name often in company with those great
ones, Newtone, Leibnitz, and Wolfius,
and Leibnitz's Monades often mentioned:
a new doctrine which, perhaps, you have
seen, and is of great repute in
Germany'' (emphasis and punctuation
added).

Colden's work had been printed in
Germany, because the opposition to him
in England was too violent. As a
sympathetic Royal Fellow later
explained to him:

``The state of the
case seems to be this--that every one
is so satisfied with Sir Isaac's
[system] that they have no curiosity to
examine yours. Was it in Latin--in
Germany or France it would not want for
perusal.''

Another colonial correspondent of
Colden's, Alexander Garden of South
Carolina, bluntly denounced the Royal
Society as

``either too lazy and too
indolent or too conceited to receive
any new thoughts from any one but an
F.R.S. [Fellow of the Royal
Society].... They would stumble at them
promulgated by one in America tho
supported by the clearest reasoning and
demonstration.''

We learn from other
correspondences from Garden, that
Colden wrote his own study of the
Leibniz-Newton controversy, which was
forwarded to the Royal Society of
Edinburgh:

Nov. 22, 1755: ``... What you
lastly observe about Mr. Leibnitz gives
me great pleasure, for tho I believe
your principles are sufficiently
supported by your consequent natural
account for the Phenomena, yet so great
an authority is very agreeable.''

Jan. 10, 1757: ``I have just now
copied over your very ingenious
reflexions in the Newtonian and
Leibnizian Controversy to send to the
Edinburgh Society....''

April, 15, 1757: ``He [Dr. Whytt
of Edinburgh] received your former
Letter to me with great joy and
satisfaction, but says he is afraid
that some of the Socii will (they are
all rigid and literal Newtonians) have
their objections. He was to read it
before them at first meeting. I have
sent him your observations on the
Leibnitzian Controversy.''

The attitude of colonial thinkers
to Newton is also neatly expressed in a
letter to Colden from his friend at
Albany, Capt. John Rutherford, who
evidently was concerned about Colden's
tendency to propitiate the Newtonians:

``To humble you a little further
about Sir Isaac,|... remember he
differs 500 years in his Cronology from
the rest of Mankind, in which he has
not yet been followed by one Author at
home or abroad, nor can I ever envy a
man or call him truly great who never
enjoyed any pleasure in society, died a
virgin, and wrote upon the
Revelations...'' .

Rutherford also acknowledged
himself an adherent of Leibniz's most
famous doctrine, ``the best of all
possible worlds'':

``I am firmly persuaded The Great
Author of Nature at the Creation, of
all possible Worlds chused the best or
most perfect & allways maintains it
so....''

The threat of an American revolt
against Newton was evidently considered
such a serious matter, that the worst
traitor to Leibniz to be found on the
continent of Europe, Leonard Euler of
the Berlin Academy, was deployed
directly into the fray. Euler's remarks
on Colden's work, dated Nov. 21, 1752,
were forwarded to him via London.

Euler rudely dismissed Colden's
idea as ``destitute of all
Foundation,'' and criticized his
``attempts to attack the best
Establish'd propositions of the late
Sr. Isaac Newton....'' Colden reported
this to Franklin, saying of Euler, ``He
writes much like a Pedant highly
conceited of himself.''

Franklin was quite aware of the
scientific and technological revolution
he was about to unleash with his
electrical discoveries, telling Colden,
``There are no Bounds (but what Expence
and Labour give) to the Force Man may
raise and use in the Electric Way.''
Proving that the static electricity
collected in his bottles, was of the
same nature as an awesome bolt of
lightning, would establish this fact in
the most dramatic fashion.

Franklin's
Revolutionary
Intentions

The dialogue between Franklin and
Colden, just prior to the 1752 kite
experiment, also establishes, beyond
any doubt, Franklin's equally
revolutionary intentions against the
Newtonians.

Colden wrote to Franklin on March
16:

``In my opinion no set of
experiments which I have read lead so
directly towards discovering the cause
of Electricity as yours do. However I
find it difficult to form any
conception of this cause which in any
degree satisfies my mind. I conceive it
to be a most subtile elastic fluid like
our air, but incomparably more subtile
and more elastic.''

Franklin replied on April 23,
explicitly rejecting the Newtonian
``particles and the void'' dogma, and
proposing that electricity may very
well be that ``subtle elastic fluid''
which fills the ``regions above our
atmosphere'':

``Your conception of the Electric
Fluid, that it is incomparably more
subtil than Air, is undoubtedly just.
It pervades dense matter with the
greatest Ease: But it does not seem to
mix or incorporate willingly with mere
Air, as it does with other matter....
Who knows then, but there may be, as
the Antients thought, a Region of this
Fire, above our Atmosphere, prevented
by our Air and its own too great
Distance for Attraction, from joining
our Earth?|... yet some of it be low
enough to attach itself to our highest
Clouds, and thence they becoming
electrified may be attracted by and
descend towards the Earth, and
discharge their Watry Contents together
with that Etherial Fire. Perhaps the
Aurorae Boreales are Currents of this
Fluid in its own Region above our
Atmopshere, becoming from their own
Motion visible....

``But I must own that I am much in
the Dark about Light. I am not
satisfied with the doctrine that
supposes particles of matter call'd
light continually driven off from the
Sun's Surface, with a Swiftness so
prodigious!|...

``May not all the Phaenomena of
Light be more conveniently solved, by
supposing universal space filled with a
subtle elastic fluid, which when at
rest is not visible, but whose
Vibrations affect that fine Sense the
Eye...|?'' .

Franklin was quite conscious that
he was thus plotting the downfall of
the Newtonian establishment, as he
concludes his letter with the
following:

``|'Tis well we are not, as poor
Galileo was, subject to the Inquisition
for philosophical heresy. My whispers
against the orthodox doctrine in
private letters, would be dangerous;
your writing and printing would be
highly criminal. As it is, you must
expect some Censure, but one heretic
will surely excuse another.''

Franklin first announced the
success of his experiment in a letter
to his English scientific correspondent
Peter Collinson, explaining how to
construct a kite made of a silk
handkerchief--``fitter to bear the Wet
and Wind of a Thundergust without
tearing''--with a sharp wire protruding
above its wood frame, and a key tied to
a silk ribbon on the twine near the
experimenter's hand.

In a thunderstorm,

``when the Rain
has wet the Kite and Twine, so that it
can conduct the Electric Fire freely,
you will find it stream out plentifully
from the Key on the Approach of your
Knuckle. At this key the Phial may be
charged; and from Electric Fire thus
obtained, Spirits may be kindled, and
all the other Electric Experiments be
performed, which are usually done by
the Help of a rubbed Glass Globe or
Tube, and thereby the sameness of the
electric matter with that of lightning
completely demonstrated.'' (emphasis
added)

Franklin remained consistent to
his anti-Newtonian principles until the
end of his life, a philosophical
commitment morally identical to his
determination to overthrow the
``absolute Tyranny'' of the British
Crown. In 1784, at Passy, France, with
the first phase of the Revolution
accomplished, Franklin wrote his
``Loose Thoughts on a Universal
Fluid,'' still founded on the premise
that, ``Universal Space, as far as we
know of it, seems to be filled with a
subtle fluid, whose motion, or
vibration, is called light.''

About the same time, in a letter
addressed to the ``Financier of the
Revolution'' Robert Morris, the
anti-populist Franklin also militantly
disposed of Locke's sacred right of
``Property'':

``The Remissness of our People in
Paying Taxes is highly blameable; the
Unwillingness to pay them is still more
so. I see, in some Resolutions of Town
Meetings, a Remonstrance against giving
Congress a Power to take, as they call
it, the People's Money out of their
Pockets....

``All Property, indeed, except the
Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his
Matchcoat, and other little
Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for
his Subsistence, seem to me to be the
creature of public convention. Hence
the public has the right of regulating
descents, and all other conveyances of
property, and even of limiting the
quantity and uses of it. All the
Property that is necessary to a Man,
for the Conservation of the Individual
and the Propagation of the Species, is
his natural Right, which none can
justly deprive him of: But all
property superfluous to such purposes
is the property of the public, who, by
their laws, have created it, and who
may therefore by other laws dispose of
it, whenever the welfare of the public
shall demand such disposition. He that
does not like civil Society on these
Terms, let him retire and live among
Savages. He can have no right to the
benefits of Society, who will not pay
his Club towards the Support of it.''

Thus does the most famous aphorism
concerning Franklin--``He stole
lightning from the Heavens, and the
sceptre from Tyrants''--assume its true
significance, since the one
achievement was a lawful prelude to the
other. Thus also should we learn, as
Lyndon LaRouche insists, that no
lasting victory over the oligarchy is
possible, without defeating the legacy
of Locke and Newton in our intellectual
life today.
Note: In all quotes, original spelling
has been preserved, while emphasis has
been added by the author.

Appendix

The hostility of the greatest of the
American founders to Locke's ideology
of ``property'' and ``free market,'' is
further revealed by a little-known
clause of the Declaration of
Independence, which was personally
approved by Benjamin Franklin and John
Adams, but later excluded from the
document in a fateful compromise. This
was the indictment of King George III
for the promotion of black chattel
slavery, which read:

``He has waged cruel war against
human nature itself, violating its most
sacred rights of life & liberty in the
persons of a distant people who never
offended him, captivating & carrying
them into slavery in another
hemisphere, or to incur miserable death
in their transportation thither. This
piratical warfare, the opprobrium of
infidel powers, is the warfare of the
Christian king of Great Britain.
Determined to keep open a market where
MEN should be bought & sold, he has
prostituted his negative for
suppressing every legislative attempt
to prohibit or restrain this execrable
commerce; and that this assemblage of
horrors might want no fact of
distinguished die, he is now exciting
those very people to rise in arms among
us, and to purchase that liberty of
which he has deprived them, by
murdering the people upon whom he
also obtruded them; thus paying off
former crimes committed against the
liberties of one people, with crimes
which he urges them to commit against
the lives of another.''

Calling slavery ``an atrocious
debasement of human nature,'' Benjamin
Franklin went on to found the
Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the
Abolition of Slavery. Tolerating
slavery, Franklin warned prophetically,
would draw down ``the displeasure of the
great and impartial Ruler of the
Universe upon our country.''

Captions

Benjamin Franklin, with the other
authors of the Declaration: Jefferson,
Adams, Livingston, and Sherman.

Locke's 1690 `Essay Concerning The True
Original Extent And End Of Civil
Government,' purports to prove that
`government has no other end but the
preservation of property....' John
Locke was appointed a founding member
of the British Board of Trade, and
proved himself the greatest
imperialist, and most implacable enemy
of America.

`Our differences are on subjects of
some importance,' Leibniz emphasizes in
his `Reflections,' a refuation of
Locke's entire system: `The question is
to know whether the soul in itself is
entirely empty, and whether all that is
traced thereon comes solely from the
senses and from experience; or, as I
believe, with St. Paul (Romans 2: 15)
where he remarks that the law of God is
written in the heart.'

Library of Congress
Thomas Hobbes
Issac Newton

The falsehood around which the
Anglophile myth revolves, is that the
strongest influences on the American
founders, were the political philosophy
of John Locke and his predecessors,
Thomas Hobbes and Isaac Newton. In
fact, they were responsible for
initiating that `long train of abuses
and usurpations,' leading to the
revolution against the very empire
which they had worked to create.

Dover Pictorial Archive Series
King George III

The Declaration of Independence
specifically condemned several of the
despotic measures originally imposed by
Locke himself, as later enforced by
King George III and the British
Parliament, `all having in direct
object the establishment of an absolute
Tyranny over these States....'

Library of Congress
Queen Anne

Thanks to the 1701 Act of Settlement,
Leibniz's brilliant student, the
Electress Sophia would succeed to the
English throne, with the death of the
childless Queen Anne, thus, Leibniz
became the rallying-point of republican
forces all over the English-speaking
world, including the American colonies.

Library of Congress
Jonathan Swift
Robert Harley
Until its 1714 defeat, a powerful
``national party'' opposed to
imperialism still existed in England,
organized around the political figures
of Jonathan Swift and English patriot
Robert Harley. Harley's parliamentary
faction launched a series of bold
economic and political initiatives
directly counter to the imperialist
design.

Library of Congress
James Logan
Logan's library held over 2,600
volumes. Franklin wrote: ``It contains
the best Editions of the best Books in
various Languages, Arts and Sciences,
and is without Doubt the largest, and
by far the most valuable Collection of
the Kind in this part of the World, and
will convey the Name of Logan thro'
Ages, with Honour, to the latest
Posterity.''

Library of Congressbr>
Franklin's Philadelphia Book and
Printing Shop

Along with opening his home and library
to Franklin and his young associates,
Logan is credited with arranging the
first large job for Franklin's new
printing business in 1731. Franklin
also printed Logan's translations of
Cato and Cicero, writing in a preface
his wish that: `this first Translation
of a Classic in this Western World may
be followed with many others....'

The preceding article is a rough version of the article that appeared in
The American Almanac. It is made available here with the permission of The New
Federalist Newspaper. Any use of, or quotations from, this article must attribute them to The
New Federalist, and The American Almanac.